In this short note, we provide an explicit sufficient condition for non-explosion of Crump--Mode--Jagers branching processes with pure birth reproduction. It shows that the standard sufficient condition for explosion, namely the convergence of the series of reciprocals of the birth rates, is -- at least for rate sequences without excessive oscillations -- remarkably close to being necessary. At the same time, it is not necessary in full generality: we construct a counterexample which also yields a general preferential attachment tree without fitness with an infinite path and no vertices of infinite degree, thereby answering an open question previously raised in the literature.